Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, a new weekly discussion that searches for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide.

This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.

On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system.

Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking psychiatric care around the world.

This week, we interview
Dr. David Healy, internationally respected
psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist scientist and author. A
professor of Psychiatry in Wales, David studied medicine in Dublin,
and at Cambridge University. He is a former Secretary of the
British Association for Psychopharmacology, and has authored more
than 200 peer-reviewed articles and 20 books, including The
Antidepressant Era and The Creation of Psychopharmacology. David’s
latest book, Pharmageddon, documents the riveting and terrifying
story of how pharmaceutical companies have hijacked healthcare in
America and the life-threatening results. David’s main areas of
research are clinical trials in psychopharmacology, the history of
psychopharmacology, and the impact of both trials and psychotropic
drugs on our culture. We talk prescribing practice, medicine safety
and regulation.

In this episode we
discuss:

How Dr. Healy became interested
in drug adverse reactions and medicine safety.

How he came to see the harm that
medications can cause and why treatment induced harm, mainly
through medications is a major concern.

How he witnessed parents become
more anxious when taking SSRI antidepressant drugs

How David established Data Based
Medicine and the website risk.org to
increase awareness of medication safety

How people can now inform
themselves about the risks with medications much more easily now
with access to the internet

That rxisk.org is a very important resource for
people wanting to know more about their medications

That the number of
antidepressants being used year on year is increasing because more
people are unable to get off the drugs

How the regulation of
Pharmaceutical manufacturers is ineffective because it is mainly a
bureaucratic exercise

That it’s not just drugs used in
the mental health field that are problematic

We need to better distinguish
between distress and a disease

Why people differ when trying to
withdraw from psychiatric drugs

That trials in the 1980s on
healthy volunteers showed that ssri antidepressants made them
anxious and exhibit depressive symptoms within two
weeks

That there is nowhere near
enough research on antidepressant dependance and
withdrawal

About the Podcast

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, a new weekly discussion that searches for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide.
This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care and mental health. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.
On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system. Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking mental health around the world.
For more information visit madinamerica.com
To contact us email podcasts@madinamerica.com